A FATHER AND A BICYCLE.(childhood reminiscences)(Brief Article)

My father was not a man blessed with unusual talents. If a model father can rebuild the lawnmower, rig up a punching bag properly, offer tips on your science project or advice on your lifesaving merit badge, help with math homework, put a new bike together, or replace a screen on a patio door, then my father was not a model father.

My earliest Christmas memory is of lying in my bed late at night, hearing my father--with my mother as his assistant--attempting to assemble a snare drum Santa had been commanded to deliver. Work went on in the living room for hours. I can still hear the sizzle of the loose snares on the drum's bottom as my father sought to stretch them, the squeak of brass screws that pulled the skin taut as my mother whispered her help and my father grunted and muttered with thwarted patience. In my mind today--fifty years later--I still see the bead of yellow light under my bedroom door as the night wore on and I waited, silent and eager.

By dawn nothing had been fixed. We all three stood in the cheery Christmas-tree glow and stared at the smart-looking wooden drum, its skin attached on only one side, and no snares. Two wooden drumsticks and two retractable metal brushes, which my mother had tied with red satin bows, were leaned against the unfinished drum shell. Santa had simply not had time enough. There were, after all, other boys and girls farther along on his route.

Another memory is of the punching bag, whose black metal bracket-frame my father nailed but would not bolt to the stud wall in our utility room, the cheap brown bag tightly inflated and adangle on the S hook provided. When I hit the bag the first good hard one, the whole contraption fell down. We nailed it up again, I hit it, and it all fell down again. The only thing to keep it up, it seemed, was never to hit it. Then it was fine. The bag was still there, unstruck but presentably on the wall, when my father died and we moved away.

The saddest, though, was the Christmas tree. (So many of these small defeats occurred at Christmas. Christmas can make everything so woeful.) We--my father and I--set off for the woods to find a tree. The Natchez Trace was the place we chose. And when we'd trekked about for a time, with me carrying my Boy Scout hatchet, I spied the tree I liked--a full and shapely cedar, which my father deemed too large, too tall to go in our house. Only I knew it wasn't. And after we'd argued over it I carried the day, and in quick order chopped the tree down.

But when we'd taken it home in the car and brought it into the house, the living room was in fact too small, too low--it was just a six-room, pastel suburban house. The peak I'd imagined holding the Wise Men's star had to bend double to fit the ceiling, which made my father suddenly, almost unnaturally angry--something about a tree being a live thing, and we had killed it. It frustrated him. He dragged the big tree through the house and ...